James Clarence Mangan. His Selected Poems. With a Study by the Editor Louise Imogen Gviney. London: John Lane, 1897. First Edition. Pp xii, 361, uncut. Publisher’s green cloth boards, title & floral shamrock arrangement in gilt, to spine, top edge in gilt. A fine bright copy.

Frontispiece portrait of Mangan, featuring his dedication in facsimile. Title page in ornate woodblock. 

James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin just before Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion in 1803, and died in destitution in 1849, as the Great Famine drew to a close. Accounts of Mangan’s impoverishment, his reclusive behaviour, his addiction to alcohol, combined with the darkness of late poems like ‘The Nameless One,’ have encouraged readers to see Mangan as the epitome of pathos, and a mirror of the degraded colonial condition of nineteenth-century Ireland itself.